Nineteenth Century Philosophy

Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic

How did Gottlob Frege attempt to reduce mathematics to logic?

In his Foundations of Arithmetic (1884), Frege argued that logic, or the laws of thought, are not descriptive of how we think and that words do not have meaning in isolation but only within context. Then in his two-volume Basic Laws of Arithmetic (1893 and 1903), Frege began his project in earnest by showing that every predicate determines a class that can be described logically. For example, red is a predicate and red determines a class of red things.